Wuh?

Every time I try to get onto a Blogspot blog* I'm getting this:


It was working fine earlier, and I haven't downloaded anything for weeks.

Is this happening to anyone else or should I be slightly worried?

(*Except those with custom domain names, like this one)

UPDATE: Never mind. Seems to be working fine now.

Question for the audience

Is a Playstation 3 and GTA: IV worth bankrupting myself for?

'Cause I'm sorely tempted...

New Portishead album out tomorrow

Should be good.

123

I've been tagged (by Snoopy) with the fifth sentence meme.

1. Pick up the nearest book
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you

So here goes:

If the Ch'in dynasty had lasted, the political effects of the Book Burning Edict would have been far-reaching. Legalism might have been permanently established as the state doctrine, and men of other persuasions excluded from government careers. The Confucianists have never tired of blaming the First Emperor for this attempt at intellectual restriction, conveniently overlooking the fact that they themselves suppressed their opponents as soon as they had the power to do so.

Purely out of curiosity at what books people have near their computer, I'll tag Tom, David, Ario, Alex and Incitatus. But none of them should feel any obligation to respond. 

Will they never learn?

Everytime I hear something along the lines of:

...on the eve of the strike, UK ministers again urged the public not to panic buy fuel.

I have to fight off the urge to grab whatever containers are at hand and rush off to the nearest petrol station.

And I don't even have a car.

3:10 to Yuma

Having recently watched it on DVD, I have to echo Courtney's recommendation.



Like most great films it has a relatively simple plot: A damaged war veteran (Christian Bale) volunteers to help escort a charming but psychopathic bank robber (Russell Crowe) across country and put him on the 3:10 to Yuma, a prison train. Between them and their destination lies both Crowe's gang and hostile Apaches. I'm not a big fan of westerns, but it's well worth watching for both the breath-taking scenery and mesmerising performances from Bale and Crowe.

Damn you meat-eaters, you'll kill us all!

From ScienceDaily:

It may not be an ideal topic for polite conversation, but human beings are swarming with bacteria: Even the average healthy adult plays host to about 100 trillion microscopic organisms. Infection takes place when the bacteria get out of hand.

Now, a University of Kansas researcher has penned a history of the struggle between man and bacteria — and warns that humankind someday may lose its advantage.

As the article goes on to explain, the big problem is that bacteria are rapidly evolving resistance to antibiotics:

“Bacteria that survive the initial onslaught of antibiotics then are increasingly resistant to them,” said Mitscher. “The sensitive proportion of the bacterial population dies, but then the survivors multiply quickly — and they are less sensitive to antibiotics. The sensitivity goes all the way from requiring a longer course of therapy or a higher dose, to being totally unaffected by the antibiotic.”

Humans have overused antibiotics in areas such as agriculture, worsening the dilemma of highly resistant bacteria.

“People are surprised to learn that almost half of all the antibiotics produced in the world are used in animal husbandry,” said Mitscher. “I’m not referring to using antibiotics for curing infections of animals — what I mean is use of antibiotics in relatively small doses as an animal-feed supplement. Animals then grow quicker to a marketable size, and this is seen as a universal good. The difficulty is that use of antibiotics in that setting is an invitation towards resistance. Unfortunately, humans get infected with resistant strains that were generated in animals in this manner.”

These days, with so-called “super-bugs” like Methacillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) making news, resistance is becoming a major public health problem.

Doesn't sound good.

He gets around a bit...

From Wikipedia:

St. George is the patron saint of Aragon, Canada, Catalonia, China, England, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Montenegro, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, and Serbia, as well as the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Ferrara, Freiburg, Genoa, Ljubljana, and Moscow, as well as a wide range of professions, organisations and disease sufferers.

He's apparently the patron saint of leprosy, skin diseases and syphilis.

Lovely.

Makes you wonder exactly what it was he died of.

Something I'd rather not have known...

According to the 'Brain Challenge' game I just got for my iPod Nano, I have the cerebral age of 71.

A bit of Mitchell and Webb

The illusion of being haunted

From Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Science' blog:

In February a psychic was called to investigate a reported zombie in underground tunnels at an Eastbourne sewage plant. “It’s not funny going to work and worrying that a zombie might be around the corner,” said one plant worker.

What?!

The Daily Mail has more:

The clairvoyant said: "There seems to be one particular area that's giving people the creeps. People have seen and felt things."

Mr Wey said: "Michael instantly detected someone standing there and he was suspicious there was something quite unusual there.

"The conclusion is, we can't prove it is haunted because of strong electromagnetic fields, which can cause the illusion of being haunted, the feeling of being touched or watched, but there is definitely paranormal activity.

Seriously... what?!

Surely, in this day and age...

...assembling flat-pack furniture should be a lot easier than it is.

The palm of my hand is raw from the butt of the screwdriver digging into it. And I almost sat on the tube of glue supplied.

(I know they always include spares, but is it normal to have about twenty small screws left over?)

Brokeback Mountain

Watched 'Brokeback Mountain' last night.

I'd initially avoided it as the trailer made it look quite dull and incredibly "worthy", but a few people had recommended it to me so I decided to give it a go.

My opinion: Meh.

Sadly, my trailer-based suspicions were more or less correct and I found myself fairly bored by it. I wanted to like it: Ang Lee's not a bad director and both Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal can act, but the biggest problem seemed to be that none of the characters or ideas in the film were really developed. There's not much to the two main characters beyond the fact that a) they're cowboys, b) they're gay/bisexual and c) they have trouble reconciling those two things. The changing (and unchanging) face of mid-American society was interesting, but never really gone into. And the impact of the two characters' affair on their families was treated in, what seemed to me, a fairly shallow fashion.

Maybe it was just a little too subtle for me, but I found it difficult to engage with and care about what was happening.

Did I miss something?

And they said I'd never amount to anything!

This is currently the 691st most influential blog in the UK blogosphere, according to the rankings at Wikio.

"You just defended us using a water pistol? I bloody love you!"

Couldn't find a clip of Pompeii erupting, but this is pretty good as well:

Want to watch 'Doctor Who' on your iPod?

Step 1: Download a Youtube to iPod converter.

(Note: Any downloading from the Internet is done at your own risk and I accept no responsibility whatsoever for any viruses, malware or sentient digital lifeforms that come with it.)

Step 2: Find the numerous copies of the 'Doctor Who' episode on Youtube

(Note: I'm not condoning what is clearly a grievous breach of copyright by these people. Uploading is naughty. Very naughty.)

Step 3: Download these videos with the converter.

Step 4: Arrange them, in order, in a playlist with iTunes.

Step 5: Copy the playlist to you Ipod nano.

Step 6: Watch them on your iPod nano.

(Note: 1. I haven't actually done this, so I don't know if it actually works. It should. In theory. 2. I accept no responsibility for any damage done to your eyesight trying to watch a 45 minute episode on that tiny screen.)

UPDATE: Tried it. iPod went slightly mental. Might not be due to this though and it's working fine now.

See it while you can

Diminutive Phobos is, the New Scientist notes, ultimately doomed since it's "spiralling towards Mars at a rate of 1.8 metres per century". In around 50 million years it will crash into Mars - if the Red Planet's gravity doesn't pull it apart first.

From.

Here's what wrong with the media...

I'm currently reading Steven Pinker's 'The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature' (a birthday present from my younger brother), which I'd highly recommend. I seem to be on sort of an evolutionary psychology roll at the moment, having recently finished Matt Ridley's 'Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human' (also highly recommended) as well. The genetic aspect of psychology was always something that bored me at A-Level (leading to a less than great mark in the subject), but both these books manage to make the subject fascinating and are incredibly readable (although some basic knowledge of evolution and biology will probably help quite a bit).

One of the benefits of reading these books is allowing you to see just how cack the media (even scientific journals) are at reporting any genetics-related discoveries. Take this comment from the Times' 'Comment Central':

Here's what's wrong with Robert Mugabe. His AVPR1a is too long.

Brace yourself for a new wave of scientific work linking genes with behaviour. Nature brings a cracking example with research suggesting that the behaviour of the world's most reprehensible despots is derived from their genetic code.

Is it really still such a radical idea that we're (largely) biological beings?

Clearly the comment is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it (along with Nature) still demonstrates the sensationalist tone usually adopted by the media when it comes to these kind of issues. The Nature article mentioned has more details on the actual study and it's findings, which are slightly less conclusive than suggested above:

Ebstein and his colleagues decided to look at AVPR1a because it is known to produce receptors in the brain that detect vasopressin, a hormone involved in altruism and 'prosocial' behaviour. Studies of prairie voles have previously shown that this hormone is important for binding together these rodents' tight-knit social groups.

Ebstein's team wondered whether differences in how this receptor is expressed in the human brain may make different people more or less likely to behave generously.

To find out, they tested DNA samples from more than 200 student volunteers, before asking the students to play the dictator game (volunteers were not told the name of the game, lest it influence their behaviour). Students were divided into two groups: 'dictators' and 'receivers' (called 'A' and 'B' to the participants). Each dictator was told that they would receive 50 shekels (worth about US$14), but were free to share as much or as little of this with a receiver, whom they would never have to meet. The receiver's fortunes thus depended entirely on the dictator's generosity.

About 18% of all dictators kept all of the money, Ebstein and his colleagues report in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior 1. About one-third split the money down the middle, and a generous 6% gave the whole lot away.

Long and short

There was no connection between the participants' gender and their behaviour, the team reports. But there was a link to the length of the AVPR1a gene: people were more likely to behave selfishly the shorter their version of this gene.

So: As correlation doesn't imply causation, the most that the study demonstrates is that selfish people are more likely to have a shorter version of the AVPR1a gene, although 200 students seems far too small a sample size to base even such a tentative conclusion on. (The fact that, as far as I'm aware, none of the "selfish" students were actual dictators - or showed signs of becoming one - also slightly undermines the idea that a short AVPR1a gene is a significant cause of running a country along totalitarian lines). Clearly, if this is a factor in selfish behaviour, it's far from enough to make someone a potential Hitler.

But that's not quite as sexy or eye-catching as the idea that actions of people like Stalin were "Dictated by their DNA".

Who says watching TV never gets you anywhere?

Last night, for the first time ever, there was a Doctor Who question at the pub quiz I go to. Turns out that I was the only person in the pub (aside from the quiz master, obviously) who knew what U.N.I.T. stood for.

I feel quite proud about that. Not sure if I should or not. But I do.

Doctor Who

That was pretty good, wasn't it?